Pitas

This really isn't going to become a food blog, but here was today's project. Pitas! We all love hummus in our family and have been eating it with mini pitas. Greg suggested that I make some, and I thought it was a decent idea. I used this recepe: http://greekfood.about.com/od/greekbreadspitas/r/pitabread.htm They were easy to make and turned out reasonably enough. The dough actually raised for me, which I was nervous about because I haven't had the best of luck with doughs outside of my bread maker lately. They did say to let it sit for 1.5-2 hours which is longer than other recipes I've tried. I didn't take any pictures while making the dough or rolling it out. It took a while to roll out all the dough, but it wasn't difficult. They didn't brown much in the oven, but I didn't really expect them to as the recipe says to heat and brown them in a pan with a little oil before eating. I did that with a few of the pitas and froze most of them. From the oven:

After a bit of browning

I did think it was funny that if you push down on the pitas as they're browning with a spatula the steam gets caught inside sometimes and makes them puff up.

Butter

Last weekend I tried making butter. I started with some heavy whipping cream in a jar that I handed to the girls.

Valerie jumped around with it for a while and Cordelia took a turn at shaking it, as did I, but I ended up "cheating" and using my KitchenAid. It started with whipping cream:

Then it became whipped cream:

Then you could see the buttermilk coming out.

It would run out of the stuff in the attachment. It started looking rather chunky, then I strained out the milk.

It didn't come together like butter as I had expected until I put it back into the mixer to get more of the milk out:

You then put it in a bowl of cold water and knead it a bit to get the last of the milk out (I guess any milk left in it makes it go off more quickly).

When the water stays clear, you're done. I took some of the butter and added honey to it:

Yum! Of course I also had to make bread to go with the honey butter. I ended up with 1 pound, 10 ounces of butter from a half gallon of heavy whipping cream. I also ended up with a fair amount of buttermilk. I froze 3, 4 oz pats of butter wrapped in parchment paper and all of the buttermilk (but not in parchment paper). It was neat to see the change from cream to butter, but it took much longer than I had expected, even in the KitchenAid. I will probably do it again, but not for a while. We don't really use much butter and I need to figure out what to do with the buttermilk first.

Sweater update

Looking back, it seems I haven't updated on my sweater in quite a while. So, the back. I got about 2/3rd of the back finished and realized that I made a mistake in the cabling.

The first two repeats are correct. In the next 3, I forgot one twist in the center. I couldn't bear the thought of ripping it all out so I continued and made the next repeats correct. Now there are 2 correct, 3 incorrect and 2 1/2 correct. It almost looks intentional. I'm calling it a "signature". Here's a better picture showing the mistake:

That's how far I was when I noticed. :( I finished the back and the left front without too many incidents, non major. I started the right front. Again I noticed a cable error. This one I had to correct. Since I had already completed half of the front (it's a cardigan) any errors will be obvious so I ripped out most of one repeat to fix it. This time I had forgotten the second cable on the side twists. It looked very odd. Later I realized I had repeated a row that led to an odd shaped cable so I had to fix that as well. It only involved tearing out a few rows. I'm getting good at it :D I guess I did get a picture of the first right front cable mistake. This one I corrected. It looks like I had to tear out a full repeat.

Here's where the left front (corrected) was as of Friday

I've made it to the arm hole shaping as of last night. Another good night of knitting and I should be close to finishing this piece. Then it's on to sleeves.